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This tactic has been discussed here for a number of months now. Nice to see that these sites are no longer appearing in the SERPS.
The sites that were doing this seem to have been completely booted from the index, too. Toolbar shows a gray PR.
Of course they would all survive a manual review anyway;)
Now, can we think about penalizing sites that use a "refresh" or other means to trap visitors so they can't back out of a site? This practice really does degrade the user experience.
I'm working with them to try and help them out, but man I feel sorry for them. I'm thinking that someone over at our business partner is about to lose their job.
Zuko
So the bold move to make himself look like some type of hero got him a canned and word around the office is that because it may be considered somekind of employee misconduct, he might not be able to collect unemployment.
There are several Threads on other forums about them, where names are named and example Page URLs are given.
Google for it.
[added]More proof of the world's largest circling fleet of black helicopters[/added]
I've linked to this thread from the one at my forum where people were posting about getting banned from this. Hopefully they'll clean up the mess from the spammy SEO company and get reincluded according to GG's instructions.
What really gets me though, are those Webmasters who you warn about this stuff beforehand, and yet they can't resist the lure of quick-fix high rankings. :(
Not any more, MrFishGuy. Which one is your site so we can see how you're spamming and snitch on you here?
It answers the $64 question.
Now another one.
Is there no honour amongst thieves?:)
After talking with an "engineer" who assured me that the mouseover pages were "legit" with Google, despite them being blatant doorways- I ended the discussion with "they are legit, until discovered." Time from discovery to banishment, oh, aproximately 6 days.
Way to go Google!
Play clean, win big.
PS> I think we all hold the power to figure out who the SEO company was.
PPS. The rep told me they have over 6,000 clients. Thats a lot of traffic. It may take a while.
Any chance the you guys have a fix in mind for the redirect pagejackers?
An easy way to fix that would be for Google to first drop any pages that have a META REFRESH or Javascript redirect in them all together. Then, scan the rest of the sites at two different intervals, one with the normal "Googlebot" UserAgent and another from a user agent that matches Internet Explorer 6. If the two don't match within a certain percentage of variation (a small percentage would allow for differences such as pages that have hit counters, advertisements, or display the date/time) drop them.
Home pages on some of my sites (and some internal pages) change on every visit as they run from a database - I change the content to promote different products and to keep the site fresh for visitors.
Not an uncommon practice.
Where would this leave my sites with your idea? :( ;)
Not to sound too holier than thou, but we have been competing with these spam tactictioners for a long time, and I for one think the sites employing these methods should not be let right back into the G serps.
Does anyone really think the majority of these sites did not know what this SEO Firm(does not seem quite right to use this acronym)was doing was underhanded? Sure, there are some innocent victims, but a simple slap on the wrist is not sufficient.
It's a shame some of the innocents also will be punished, but they should have done their homework. It is not as if this firm and firms like them have not been discussed. They cheated, it is as simple as that.Like at the Academy, you cheat and get caught, you are out.
How's about going after those other cheats - ya know, the ones who persuade other people to link to their site in exchange for a reciprocal link. They're cheating the rest of us who just build good content.
After you've done that, why not add a hypocrisy detector to your algo - that should pretty much finish the job, (best not point it this thread straight away, though, save that for an overnight run)
If you want any help, just give me shout, I can point out the cheats for you.
Fortunately for me, every single one of my sites is number one solely because they are the best sites out there.
Honest.
Does anyone really think the majority of these sites did not know what this SEO Firm(does not seem quite right to use this acronym)was doing was underhanded?My client knew what was going on sort of. The way he explained it to me a while back was "I have a friend who knows the ins and out so i leave it up to him." As soon as I saw this thread I called and offered help getting him back in the right way, which he has agreed to accept. I've already told him he won't get the same rankings back for the terms that did not exist in his real pages unless we build real pages. Currently, there are legitimate pages on the site, however, and Google seems to prefer to root out the disease without killing the host whenever possible. I would just like to be able to offer some kind of time frame because that's my job.
